Monday, 9 March 2009

My powers of persuasion are strong - on Friday we had chippy tea. Woo!

Real Food. Please note that the Recycling Nazi got a plastic bag from the chippy. I did not.

We went to the Plaice Station (see what they've done there?) in Padgate and I had never had fish and chips from here before - but they were lovely. And the mushy peas were good.

Fish and chips and mushy peas

Forget the Industrial Revolution, Harold Pinter, The Smiths etal, the best thing to come out of the north of England is mushy peas. True northern delicacy!

Phina had a battered sausage. I found this hilarious. And she said, without even realising the innuendo, "I am well satisfied by that sausage". Nice.

Battered sausage with curry sauce and chips. Southerners really miss out on the full chip shop experience I think.

A man in the chip shop asked for his fish to be 'well done'. WTF? I have never even heard of that before. Surely a deep fat fryer can only do cooked or not cooked? And, like organ donation, salt and vinegar should be opt-out, not opt-in. Of course I want salt and vinegar, fool!

I had a powernap before heading out to watch 'Watchmen' at the PrintworksIMAX at 11.45pm. Personally, I thought it should have started at five minutes to midnight. The cinema had a security guard on the door - which tells you something about the area at night!Weirdly, the cinema was hot as Hades, when usually you are freezing your balls off. We had to sit about 5 rows back from the screen and it was a bit disorienting - not as bad as '300' from the front row though.

Movie Review Haiku - Watchmen

Boring, boring, boreIng, boring, boring, boringBoring random dwarf

For Christmas, Phina Santa got me the Watchmen graphic novel. I haven't read it yet - Twilight got in the way - but I was really looking forward to the film. The trailer looked amazing. And it had Muse in it. The reality was a bit different.

The movie was almost 3 hours long. I don't remember having been this bored by a film for a long, long time (probably musical joyfest Sweeney Todd - in which I actually fell asleep). I was bored from start to finish. I really wish I could have edited it - most of it seemed totally pointless. And the few times that I was actually interested in some plot detail, it was inevitably not developed or mentioned again.

I loved the characters of The Comedian and Rorschach - not necessarily because of the way they behaved, but for the fact that they were more interesting than the rest of the characters combined.

My main issue was Dr Manhattan. What.A.Joke. The MOST boring character in the history of film? The CGI effect looked rubbish and he was constantly walking around naked and his blue penis was incredibly distracting. To the point where I actually said out loud 'Oh, put it away!' In some scenes he was wearing a Speedo like thing, why couldn't he have worn this all the time?! The film spent waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on him and his ennui inducing back story. So uninteresting.

There was a slight plot twist when it was revealed that Ozymandias (GCSE English Shelley poem flashback) was actually the villain of the piece - one of the original superheroes. The fact that prior to this revelation he had been in the previous 130 mins of the film for about 7 minutes, made this seem slightly ludicrous.

The dwarf from 'Bad Santa' also showed up for a baffling prison scene involving a fat man and a circular saw.

Two other characters I hated were Dan AKA Nite Owl 2 and Laurie AKA Silk Spectre 2. He was a sweaty nerd and she was a total fox - and, yes, they ended up getting together. Yawn. There was a totally gratuitous sex scene in some sort of spaceship thing (which may have been called Archimedes, I had lost the will to live by this point) between the two. I don't mind on-screen filth, but this served no purpose whatsoever. And she had a mole type thing on her face which was SO distracting when it was on a 60 foot screen. I became fixated upon it.

I am probably a cinematic philistine, but I thought it was terrible. I am now trying to go into the book with an open mind. I am going in with zero expectations, so I will hopefully be pleasantly surprised by it.

On Sunday, I went to see Noah & The Whale at the Manchester Academy.I got the funniest text of the weekend in relation to this: 'Is that tonight? I'd better stop drinking.' At 2pm.

Noah & The Whale have been described as sounding like 'the best bits of The Magic Numbers, Belle & Sebastien and The Postal Service'. Described by whom, I do not know. I DO know that they may be my new favourite thing in the world. They were really good. Academy 2 is a really bizarre venue - sort of like seeing a band in the school gym - but they made it look like an old theatre. It was awesome. Even if we were surrounded by Despicable Couple Behaviour. He's going to the bar, not fucking Iraq. You don't need to kiss him goodbye.

And when they came on stage, I realised that the drummer had been sat in the bar for about an hour beforehand. Clearly, I am a superfan. Some guy at the front kept shouting 'Charlie, you're fucking gorgeous!' to the lead singer, who was very gracious about it all. My favourite was the chubby bass player because he looked like a tramp and he performed like he was playing Wembley Stadium.

Sing-A-Long to the new album

The cafe in the student union is called the Steve Biko cafe. How fucking middle-class-white-faux-liberal-student is that? Apartheid is bad, yeah? Let's name the cafe after him to show how much we hate injustice, yeah? God, I hate people sometimes.

I then started watching the kind of late night TV which makes me hate myself. Randy Jackson Presents: America's Best Dance Crew. I have a few issues with this show. For one, Randy Jackson does not make any appearance on the show. For two, what has Randy Jackson got to do with dancing? Before the gastric band, dude was so fat he could barely walk. For three, it is hosted by AC Slater from 'Saved By The Bell'. So his career's going well then. (Though I recently saw Screech on 'Hulk Hogan's Celebrity Wrestling'. I shouldn't be allowed to live.) All that being said, hearing AC Slater say 'fanny pack' just about made my life.

And to just go off on a hate filled tangent: Lady GaGa, I am sick of reading interviews where you refer to your 'art'. You are the bastard offspring of Donatella Versace (treat her like the Ghost Of Christmas Future) and a dressing up box. You don't create art; you have an average voice and stand in front of a synthesizer in children's clothing. Now kindly go away.